jonathanmorse

[jonathanmorse]

Kleist

“Manager of the Marionette Theater, New York.” Undated. George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/ggbain.00317

[jonathanmorse]

Catresponse

In this Constructivist poster from 1925, the woman calling is Lili Brik, wife of the Formalist literary theorist Osip Brik and mistress of the poet Alexander Mayakovsky. A merely literal translation, the words without the jazz, is, “Leningrad State Publisher BOOKS for all branches of knowledge.” The photography and the graphic design are by Alexander Rodchenko, whose AR monogram appears in the…

[jonathanmorse]

Little free librarian

[jonathanmorse]

Reflux of the topical

Even with our eyes averted from the human, we’ll all probably have to acknowledge, sooner or later, that floods of personality have periodically swept whelmingly over us and our epochs. Mere twentieth-century Anglo-American literary history, for instance, will yield up alluvial anecdotes of F. R. Leavis and Delmore Schwartz. Leavis, of Cambridge, was a critic who happened not to be able to write,…

[jonathanmorse]

Réverbère

[jonathanmorse]

Nor dance nor speak nor sing

. .    Exhibitors Herald, Better Theatres Supplement, November 27, 1926. Rick Zimmerman collection.  

[jonathanmorse]

Apparatus in housing

[jonathanmorse]

Sei mir gegrüßt, sei mir geküßt

[jonathanmorse]

Obviously

Black Hills Weekly (Deadwood, South Dakota), Thursday, November 26, 1924, page 3

[jonathanmorse]

That Noble Art

[jonathanmorse]

A booming crash and a burst of flame

Tampa Tribune, Friday, February 9, 1912, page 1

[jonathanmorse]

Some namings

You think of self-help books as self-help books because in 1859 an author gave his manuscript the genre-defining title of Self-Help. The author’s name happened to be Samuel Smiles. Smile yourself, ironically. And keep smiling, for a self-destructively bad-tempered Oxford philologist, George Bernard Shaw’s model for Henry Higgins in Pygmalion and My Fair Lady, was named Henry Sweet. A brain…

[jonathanmorse]

Frieze

[jonathanmorse]

Her scents

[jonathanmorse]

Solar wind; cape

[jonathanmorse]

Mrs. Bloom

[jonathanmorse]

Terms of art, 1847

Footnotes in advance: 1. “Now exhibiting” means “now being exhibited.” It’s a progressive passive construction that survives now in only a few expressions such as “Now showing” (= “Now being shown”) and “What’s cooking?” (= “What’s being cooked?”). 2. The epigraph from Hamlet’s “Speak the speech, I pray you” had extra force in 1847, when readers would have known that a daguerreotype has a mirrory…